Wide receiver Antonio Brown wants out of Pittsburgh, and it appears the Steelers are willing to accommodate the perennial Pro Bowler.
Brown made his feelings known in a social media post released on Instagram on Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Don Wright, File)

This week, in a video posted to his Instagram, Antonio Brown made his #NewDemands known. The four-time All-Pro receiver requested a trade. Brown is apparently done with Pittsburgh, in spite of the three years remaining on his $68-million contract with the Steelers.

“Time to move on and forward,” he wrote in the caption, as the looping refrain of rapper Lil Uzi Vert’s “Do What I Want” played in the background. It was a biting bit of irony considering Brown seems to have no real leverage to do what he wants.

Or … does he? It’s a question I find myself asking often these days as we hurtle into an inevitably tumultuous period of labor unrest in the sports world, where athletes continue to push the boundaries of their individual power.

The NBA is fresh off a trade deadline in which one of its best players, Anthony Davis, requested a trade that was basically orchestrated to bring him to one specific team, the Lakers. Major League Baseball’s free agency system is on the brink of collapse, as two of the league’s top talents, Bryce Harper and Manny Machado, and many other free agents remain unsigned as spring training begins. And the NFL, the least labor-conscious of the major American leagues, appears destined for a work stoppage in the not-so-distant future.

Brown isn’t even the only player on the Steelers offense in the throes of his own power struggle. Running back Le’Veon Bell already sat out an entire season trying to force the Steelers’ hand, even as his own locker room publicly turned against him. Pittsburgh still hasn’t resigned to letting Bell walk just yet, as there’s still talk he could be transition tagged, further dragging out a saga that the Steelers underestimated from the start.

The league’s history is littered with these sorts of player-team disputes. Thirty-six years ago, John Elway forced a draft-day trade to the Broncos that led Colts’ Robert Irsay to angrily declare Elway would “never be any good”. A few years later, in 1987, Eric Dickerson earned ire from football fans everywhere for complaining about his contract with the Rams, before eventually demanding a trade – from which neither Dickerson, nor those Rams would recover.

But as social media has transformed sports, giving athletes a previously unprecedented platform, star NFL players have never wielded as much individual power as they do today. Many players, like Brown and Bell, are beginning to realize the weight that influence carries. As football’s labor fight move to the forefront in the coming years, choices made by players like them, agents and the NFL Players Association could help shift the entire labor landscape of the league.

That could be a good – possibly great – change for a league that’s long cast its players as replaceable. In spite of playing the most dangerous of the major American sports, most sign non-guaranteed contracts that can easily be dumped after a year or two. As far as I’m concerned, NFL players deserve to seize all the power they can from the corporate media networks and billionaire ownership that have been using them for decades of profits.

If there’s a line between player empowerment and ego-tripping, though, Brown has crossed it more than once. He’s openly aired grievances on Instagram and Twitter. He skipped out on the team during the final week of the season, and then appeared shortly after on FOX’s “The Masked Singer”. His petulance hasn’t done him any favors.

But that doesn’t matter. Brown is still under contract, and it won’t be cheap for Pittsburgh to move him. Not to mention that his trade value has perhaps never been lower. Still, if the Steelers don’t trade Brown before March 17, their cap will incur a hit of $22.165 million for 2019, while risking the possibility that their All-Pro receiver might not play at all. Which is to say, the 30-year-old receiver has a lot more leverage than the situation might suggest.

How he’ll exercise that influence remains to be seen. A hug-it-out scenario with the Steelers is still on the table. But Brown’s situation, while perhaps undeserving of your personal sympathy, is a bold business step by one of the league’s biggest stars. When it comes to setting the table for other players after him, that’s no small thing. As others push those same boundaries in the years to come, a serious challenge to the system could arise.

The NBA finds itself at that kind of crossroads right now, with constant, wink-wink tampering and top players colluding to construct their own superteams. Logistically, NFL teams are too large to ever allow for that sort of takeover. But it’s fair to wonder whether the system might fall apart under that weight, as star players increasingly defy ownership.

A new Netflix film by Steven Soderbergh, High Flying Bird, addresses this sentiment in such a way that it seems to tell the future. A story of power and labor talks within the confines of a fictional NBA lockout, the film asks complicated questions about who actually holds power in changing sports media landscape. Its message is stunningly current, on the heels of the Davis trade fiasco and Brown’s trade demands, and the underlying questions it asks have still stuck with me, even days after.

What if players, in the NFL or elsewhere, took matters into their own hands? In the years to come, perhaps we’ll find out.

Ryan Kartje is a sports features reporter, with a special focus on the NFL and college sports. He has worked for the Orange County Register since 2012, when he was hired as UCLA beat writer. His enterprise work on the rise and fall of the daily fantasy sports industry (http://www.ocregister.com/articles/industry-689093-fantasy-daily.html) was honored in 2015 with an Associated Press Sports Editors’ enterprise award in the highest circulation category. His writing has also been honored by the Football Writers Association of America and the U.S. Basketball Writers Association. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Ryan worked for the Bloomington (Ind.) Herald-Times and Fox Sports Wisconsin, before moving out west to live by the beach and eat copious amounts of burritos.